Apple pretty much has the mass-market phone-to-TV streaming market wrapped up with AirPlay Mirroring and Apple TV for now, but other manufacturers are looking to get in on the fun with Miracast, a new standard cooked up by the Wi-Fi Alliance and adopted by nearly every major consumer electronics manufacturer.

Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Miracast™ is a groundbreaking solution for seamlessly displaying video between devices, without cables or a network connection. Users can do things like view pictures from a smartphone on a big screen television, share a laptop screen with the conference room projector in real-time, and watch live programs from a home cable box on a tablet. Miracast connections are formed using Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Wi-Fi Direct™, so access to a Wi-Fi® network is not needed – the ability to connect is inside Miracast-certified devices.

This week in Japan, Panasonic introduced a dongle, dubbed the Wireless Display Adapter EB-L70181, which can deliver Miracast to any device with an HDMI port, bringing your games, video, and TV shows from your hands to the TV set, even if it isn’t inherently Miracast compatible. Priced at about $85US the dongle will likely be available to the rest of the world in the near future.

Miracast will likely spread from the existing implementation in some TVs and Blu-ray players now, to new Android based smartphones and tablets throughout the next year, and is hopefully going to be near universal in all but the cheapest phones in the next 2-3 years. Whether Apple will support the new standard, or just dig in its heels and insist on AirPlay, is yet to be seen, but the company has never been one to follow the leader, so personally I’m not optimistic.

The Novo 8 Discovery Android tablet is one of the first tablets to features this technology and does it for around $35 with a Miracast HD Wireless dongle – making it easy to stream movies (Netflix), play video games. as well as display any other tablet and web content.

The Novo 8 Discovery – compares closely to the new Acer Iconia A1, but features a few key advantages, including: a more powerful battery (5000 mAh) compared to the 3250 mAh on the Acer; twice the DRAM (2GB DDR3); and an Power VR SGX544MP2 GPU. The Discovery is made by Ainol Electronics, which won runner-up for Best Tablet of the Year at CES 2012, for the first Novo series tablet – – and one of the first U.S. sites this new tablet is available through is called TabletSprint and is priced at $155.

The Novo 8 Discovery matches most other features of the Acer’s Inconia A1 – 16GB version (priced at $199) including an 7.85″ mini-iPad size screen, 16GB Memory, a Quad Core processor (Actions ATM7029/1.5 GHz), Android 4.2 O/S, Bluetooth, MicroSD, Front and Rear Cameras, and HDMI 1080p and one of the first resellers it’s available through is a site called TabletSprint.

Features

Most people think they have to overhaul a sprawling basement or game room in order to create a true home theater experience. But that’s certainly not the case. You can create a true home theater, a room that lets you escape from the outside world and immerse yourself in top-notch audio and larger-than-life video in so much as a spare room.

AMX-controlled smart home by MediaTech Intelligent Home Systems (www.mediatechliving.com)

Intelligent homes are nothing new. Manufacturers like Crestron, AMX, Control4, Elan, Savant, and others have been playing the home automation game for years, decades even. These OG home automation systems require a custom integrator to install, usually have some hard-wired element, and are intuitive, sophisticated, feature-rich, and highly functional.

You were blessed with lots of windows and your living room has incredible natural light. So what’s the problem? Oh, is glare ruining your TV picture? Read on to find expert advice to fix this annoying problem.

You are trying to watch a film in high-def on Apple TV, your daughter is listening to Spotify while she’s doing homework, your wife is working on her laptop, your toddler is playing on the iPad, and your son is, gulp, doing some serious PC gaming. All this online action can bring your home network to its knees.